Saturday, October 19, 2013

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

This is the continuation of my journey of trying out an odd, not overly hyped young adult book in the hopes of finding a book I kind of like; so far I've tried The 5th Wave and Beautiful Creatures, both of which fell into the "meh" category. I am not sure if Golden Boy classifies as young adult; it's definitely not your typical example and was a well-written book. But I'm not sure and I didn't find an answer from the Internets.

Shatter Me is one of the two books I've given 1 star rating this year (Beautiful Creatures being the other one). The reason I picked up this one for an attempted read was because I read that the writing was a bit different and "something special" and since one of my main complaints of the YA books I've read is usually overly simplistic prose, I figured that maybe I could at least enjoy Shatter Me for its text, if nothing else.

I was wrong. There is such thing as "worse than simple and boring-ish writing" and that is overdone, trying-too-hard, using-weird-techniques-just-for-the-sake-of-it writing. I would be willing to give Mafi props for trying to use different things and styles in the book, but it was just SO ANNOYING. Let's see if I can make a mini-review that would reflect how I felt about this book in the same vein that it was written...

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The main character of this book, Juliette, overlyemoemoemo

emotional girl with no knowledge how stunning and sexy she is because she hasn't seen herself she hasn't looked into a mirror for exactly 3 years 2 days 16 hours 300 seconds.

She likes a boy so much her jaw drops every time she sees him and all those breaths she didn't even know she was holding.

The world building was lacking in this dystopian piece for my taste, at least, and the idea that we get revealed towards the end is something that has already been done once

Have you read Graceling by Kristin Cashore? It's more fantasy than the YA novels you've been trying, but I absolutely loved it. I don't really like much YA either, but it has a kick-ass heroine, funny and engaging writing, and a cool fantasy/paranormal premise (that some people are "graced" with certain gifts, and can be recognized by having two different colored eyes). I'm trying to think of other fantasy/dystopian/paranormal YA that I really loved, but this is the closest I can think of.

Thanks for the recommendation - I have read about Cashore's series and to think about, they have received quite good opinions even from people who don't mainly read YA. I'll definitely try that out in my search for good/decent YA books :)

I haven't read it (which is a good thing, apparently! :)), so I don't get the mocking, of course, but the review made me smile nevertheless :)

I'm usually suspicious about young adult books, because I'm always expecting one of the irritating things about the plot, the writing, etc. that you mention. However, I've recently read Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, and actually liked it! It's not flawless, but rather entertaining and not stupid :) It didn't make me less cautious about YA, but at least now I know that good things exist even among them :)

I think anyone who has read this book will find it hard to resist mocking the style :) Dang, there has been quite a lot of positive fuss going around about Mis Peregrine's, I think I should check it out.

Haven't read this one, but it some blogging circles, it does seem to be pretty hyped up -- I had it on my to-read list but recently took it off because I'm getting a little burnt out on YA dystopians in general. I have nothing against YA as a genre, but I'm in need of a major break!

Yeah, I also noticed that there are sooo many young adult dystopian books out there right now and it's easy to get really tired of it. I personally didn't think the dystopian element well done in Shatter Me at all, but that all doesn't even matter because the writing style was so off-putting for me that even if the storyline would have been magnificent, I couldn't look past the text.